There are a couple of things that can get a conspiracy geek turned on. First off, you’ve gotta have the U.S. Government or, rarely, some other large-scale operation. (This can include foreign governments, groups of foreign governments in collusion, secret societies, and mega-corporations.)
They’re up to some shit. What is Grimace even supposed to be?
Then, you’ve gotta have a reason for the conspiracy. Secret research into time travel, psychotropic drugs, alternate dimensions, basically anything that’s been made into an episode of The X-Files or Fringe. Or both. (John Noble got robbed, I tell you. Fucking robbed.)
Lastly, you have to have the cover-up. It’s not a conspiracy if everyone knows about it, dumbass. Shell companies, secret government sub-agencies, hidden messages, a few murders, and boom, you’ve got a conspiracy.
And if that turns a conspiracy geek on, then The Montauk Project gives them a raging hard-on so huge that the government is gonna have to hush that shit up.
“Boner sighted, sir. Firing on your mark.”
Think of how Area 51 used to be super-secret. Not so much now, though, considering they had to acknowledge that it existed in court documents. But before the 90s, Area 51 was a place you talked about in hushed whispers, but you still knew about it. Now it’s referenced by the Las Vegas Minor League Baseball team.
I bet you thought I was joking.
So when Area 51 started becoming a household name among conspiracy theorists in the 60s and 70s, and with everyone else in the 80s and 90s, they couldn’t really do all their secret experiments at their no-longer secret base. So what happened to all of that research? Well, conspiracy lore has it that Area 51 was never a centralized location, and all the experiments done there were also done in tandem with other bases. So, they had a bunch of shit going on at a bunch of places, and the story goes that many non-aerospace related experiments were moved across the country to an Air Force base in Montauk, New York.
According to the earliest legends, Montauk Air Force Station’s original purpose was to continue the research that led to The Philadelphia Experiment and the USS Eldridge “disaster”. As time has gone by, though, and The Philadelphia Experiment has become a cheesy 80s movie and generally regarded as a hoax, that story isn’t usually the one that conspiracy theorists lead with.
There was this ship and it traveled through time and… you know what? Nevermind.
Originally, several of the less strange projects that ended up at Montauk were allegedly conducted at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. But when they needed a big-ass radar dish for their experiments in cloaking technology (See: The Philadelphia Experiment above) they moved everything, secretly, by ship to Montauk. It’s important for conspiracy theorists to note that the dish at Montauk operates at 400 – 425 mhz, which is claimed to be exactly the frequency needed to control the human mind.
“I COMMAND YOU TO CLUCK LIKE A CHICKEN. NOW MAKE ME SOME FOOD.”
As for what kind of other experiments were conducted at Montauk, you’ve got a whole range of shit, including time travel, parallel dimensions, teleportation, contact with extraterrestrials, creating objects out of thin air with psychic abilities, brainwashing and subliminal messaging, and mind-altering drugs. Oh, and the whole thing was supposedly run by Nikola Tesla, who would have been 120 years old at the time.
“Fuck death. And Edison.”
Other rumors claim that the facility stretched 12 levels underground, had hundreds of employees, and expanded underneath the city of Montauk itself. Apparently, to throw people off the trail, the government converted most of the land above the base into a national wildlife preserve, so long as everything below ground remained property of the Department of Defense. While the base began taking on a few projects in the late 60s, most of the wild shit is claimed to have occurred in the 70s and up until early 80s, when the base finally closed. Turns out that wildlife parks tend to be big tourist attractions, and so the legend goes that when loads of people started showing up for family vacations, the government realized that they’d probably have to find somewhere else to do their crazy crap. They opened it to the public as a museum in 2002.
“THE GIFT SHOP HAS NICE THINGS FOR AFFORDABLE PRICES.”
So what happened to all the experiments there when the DoD decided to close up shop? No one knows. The government probably still has plenty of other secret bases. We just may not have heard about all of them yet.
Sources:
Wikipedia (Now with more [Citation needed])
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